'A family of four costs $36,000 in welfare, but an individual after tax takes home $6500, therefore welfare makes poor people wealthy'. Apples and oranges, good for a laugh from the crowd.

'The more you use political mechanisms, the more you strain the social fabric'. What?

'You have to get a welfare supervisor approval to install a telephone'. What?

Look, he may be a prize-winning economist, but he has an ideological axe to grind. Big time. He is a proscriptive economist, he's telling us what we should be doing, but he's doing it without a lot of fact to back it up. He's talking about morals, which is not an economist's area of strength. That's really all you need to know, he wants to enforce his form of morality on others.

Maybe you have a better video, that one was really just pablum for uncritical fans of Friedman.

He never shied away from controversy, but the man always had data to back up his assertions. His economic dogma might run counter to your political/ideological axe that you're grinding, but Milton Friedman's economics only seem political to you because political parties have adopted his findings, similar to someone like Paul Krugman or John Maynard Keynes for the Democrats.

That doesn't mean he has a political agenda - in reality, his ideas have been trumpeted by both parties. For example, he advocated a cap and tax for pollution, elements of which the Democrats have latched on to lately and the Republicans have demonized. He always looked at moral or political problems through an economic lens, which some might consider him a-moral because of his positions, but his principles were based on economics and freedom/libertarianism. He also advocated the legalization of marijuana on economic grounds, a decidedly non-Republican position. So maybe you should read up a little more before you make your own accusations. I'm not going to do your homework for you.

In the very video you linked, Friedman makes unsourced, untrue or unknowable/unprovable claims every few sentences. He's a very political person. He advocates for policy changes and cultured relationships with political players around the world.

In fact, he played a personal role in policy changes in Chile, Malaysia and other sad, sad places.

Don't do my homework for me, that's fine, I'm just asking for you to take a fresh look at Friedman and be skeptical of his claims. Skepticism as in 'what is the evidence to support this', not denialism.

A lecture is not a dissertation. Please show me a lecture/debate with a "sourced claim every few sentences", and I'll show you something that will cure insomnia.

I've looked at Friedman, read one of his books, watched his series Free to Choose (both of them - multiple times), and although it is controversial and might sometimes sound counter-intuitive, his arguments are solid. If you think you can do better, I'm sure you'll have an audience here on /r/politics, but I assume most of your sourced claims will come from the likes of Keynes and Krugman, which today's economy (and prior economies) show the results of Keynesian principles.

If someone wants to persuade me to their way of thinking, they need to use facts.
Friedman's lecture was chock full of moral pronouncements without facts to back them up.
This seems to be typical for him, so I agree this is a good example video of Friedman. I think I read 'Mischief of Money' or somesuch by him, and it seemed to be completely cherry-picked and lopsided analysis to the point of looking like propaganda.

I'll check out Free to Choose (are there more than one?) at some point, but if its full of morality instead of history, I'm not going to be impressed.

Again, these are not technical, but the arguments presented are based on economic principles, and in turn, those economic principles are based on technical data. Every economist is going to disagree on what governmental policies should result from the data (and also moral principles derived from such), so in that regard, his economic perspective is based on free market principles and a more libertarian view of the benefits of capitalism.